DOVER — Eight-year-old Woodman Park School third-grader Caleb Lapene said it was his grandmother who inspired his in-progress invention, The Socker.

“My grandma said, 'I can't bend down to put my socks on,' so I said I could make something to help with that,” he explained, while working diligently last Wednesday afternoon as one of the 112 Young Inventors at WPS.

The program is running for the first time at the school and is open to all grade levels.

The group was meeting for the third time and had the more than 100 students abuzz with creativity, inspiration and a desire for problem solving.

Young Inventors is a statewide program that gives students a chance to create all sorts of inventions, according to third-grade teacher Keegan Coderre, one of the program advisers.

Young Inventors takes students through the whole invention process from asking questions to identifying a problem to planning, creating, and improving on ideas they have generated, sometimes as a group or duo or on their own.

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Ryan McBride/Staff photographer
Julia Cals, 9, left, and lifelong friend, Miller McCoy, 9, both third graders, work on their new invention last week at Woodman Park School.

Dover High School students volunteer with the group as mentors, helping encourage the younger children to continue later education in STEM courses, the popular acronym for studies in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Senior Alex Chouinard said he was asked if he wanted to help out and thought it would be a great way to give back and get involved in the community.

He said the more encouragement the students get at a younger age, the more of a head start they will have as they move forward through the educational system.

Alix Ecker, a sophomore, said it was some friends of hers that went through the engineering program — part of the Career Technical Center at the high school — who had told her how much they liked it, inspiring her to join.

She volunteers now with WPS students in hopes of doing the same for them.

“I think it's really cool to help the little kids,” she said.

Like Coderre and the other group advisers, Wendy Nasberg ane Kiley Hemphill, Ecker wants the students to learn how much fun inventing can be.

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Ryan McBride/Staff photographer
Third-grade teacher Keegan Coderre helps students with their new ideas at Woodman Park School last week during Young Inventors day.

Sharing their questions, plans, challenges and progress, the large group separates into smaller groups where students bounce ideas off each other.

Julia Cals, 9, and Miller McCoy, 8, two best friends who finished each other's excited sentences and were even born at the same hospital, said they were working on their invention together to create webbed swimming gloves.

“I thought about this long before Young Inventors,” Julia said. “They're kind of like flippers, but for your hands.

The gloves, they explained, are for people who don't know how to swim with the hope that having webbed hands will make the skill easier to learn.

Miller said they were planning on going to Goodwill after school to buy swimsuits they can use for material to make the gloves.

Once they are made, they plan to test the gloves out in the pool at The Works.

Each student keeps a Young Inventors journal where their ideas about the invention are recorded and expanded on.

Jordan Miller, 8, was working in his journal Wednesday to plan for a sonar microchip that would emit a signal through the air intended to help locate a lost remote control.

Jordan said he loses the remote a lot.

Seamus Coyne, 8, worked nearby on a similar remote control locating device, but one that used a camera to scan a room for the misplaced remote.

And if there's a room in the house where a pet is unwanted, Todd Giles, 9, took a suggestion from his friend, Jordan, creating something that would emit smoke, a known deterrent to animals like dogs according to Jordan.

“I love it,” Jordan said of the Young Inventors group. “I think it's going to help with my [remote control] problem.”

“I think it's going to help with a lot of problems,” Seamus answered.

The Young Inventors will each work on their actual projects outside of the classroom and then bring them to school on March 5 for a community celebration and judging. Students must show their inventions and explain what they do and how they made them, as well as answer questions from judges. The top scorers will go to a state competition in Concord, Coderre said.